What do you think about this system from an efficiency standpoint?
..."The E-Charger is a revolutionary new bolt-on technology that increases power without sacrificing fuel economy or emissions. The E-Charger applies stored energy via the electric motor to assist the internal combustion or compression ignition engine when extra power is needed.
The dual fuel approach allows vehicles to take advantage of the great power delivered at the equivalent of 75 cents per gallon. This 300% cost savings yields not only a product that increases performance but actually pays itself back based on the cost savings of your primary engine fuel type. The E-Charger also utilizes regenerative braking to maximize fuel consumption with up to a 25% increase in fuel economy.
Untold hours of refinement and testing, as well as many miles driven, has proven that the E-Charger system is the only green performance technology that truly can be bolted onto any application. The E-Charger is the ultimate stop gap solution to increase performance, increase MPG, and reduce emissions."...
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All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
weighs ~200 lbs with battery pack.... adds ~150 ft lbs torque.... costs under $5k.... improves gas mileage ~25%...haha yeah like I need more power....It's basically like a regular supercharger that is just powered with electricity so it improves gas mileage instead of reducing it, and reduces stress on the motor I would think....
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All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
Like a supercharger it adds power across the entire rpm range....and adds it directly to the engine crankshaft....The unit runs in 3 different modes, and you can use it to start the engine from a start which means when you are stopped the engine isn't running....another fuel saving feature....They ran it on an H2 hummer with a 6.0 litre engine that got 12 mpg before and 30 mpg with....so you get better mileage improvement on larger vehicles...and the battery pack can be any size, the one in the video is modest in size and has a 60 mile range.....
..." Hybrid Porsche 818 . The energy storage system is a 312-cell, liquid-cooled 6.8 kW·h lithium-ion battery positioned behind the passenger cell. In addition to a plug-in charge port at the passenger-side B-pillar, the batteries are also charged by regenerative braking and by excess output from the engine when the car is coasting. CO2 emissions are 79 g/km[13] and fuel consumption is 3.0 L/100 km (94 imperial mpg/78 US mpg) under the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC).The engine weighs 135 kg according to Porsche and delivers 608 metric horsepower (447 kW) at 8,500 rpm and 528 N·m (389 lbf·ft) of maximum torque. This is supplemented by two electric motors delivering an additional 279 PS (205 kW).[15] One 154 hp (115 kW)[4] electric motor drives the rear wheels in parallel with the engine and also serves as the main generator.[15] This motor and engine deliver power to the rear axle via a 7-speed gearbox coupled to Porsche's own PDK double-clutch system. The total system delivers 887 HP (652 kW) and 1,280 N·m (940 lbf·ft) of torque. In Car and Driver's independent test of the Porsche 918, C/D achieved 0-60 mph (97 km/h) in 2.2 seconds (making it the fastest accelerating production car), 0-100 mph (160 km/h) in 4.9 seconds, 0-180 mph (290 km/h) in 17.5 seconds, and the 1/4 mile in 9.8 seconds.[17][18] In Motor Trend's independent test of the Porsche 918, they also claimed it was the fastest car to 60 mph that they had ever tested.[19] It stopped from 60-0 mph in 94 feet (97–0 km/h in 29 m), and broke Motor Trend's figure 8 record at 22.2 seconds."...
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All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
Yea, the basic numbers aren't adding up for me either.
I can see it having marginal improvements on a smaller vehicle that does primarily stop and go city driving but I just can't make the purchase ROI come out anywhere close to being practical.
Once purchase and install costs are put against the equivalent quantity of fuel that money would buy and the distances that need to be traveled even at absolute peak efficiency gains it just doesn't add up.
This violates too many laws of physics. Especially the one that says you can't get something for nothing.
Friction, heat, the inherent losses incurred in each conversion of gas engine (power) to electricity, and back to crankshaft power and these same inefficiencies when braking can't possibly add to any final savings in mileage.
So, if you want to increase intermittent power output of an existing engine, maybe, but just maybe.
so a 3 PH motor starts on demand and seamlessly catches up to crank speed as the throttle travels...sure it does. they say the cogged belt goes directly to the crank....not in the pictures it doesn't. I don't see a clutch to engage/disengage the drive pulley
Okay? I see on major problem with the design. Where do you put it on a common vehicle that already doesn't have room for a small cat to fit in let alone something near the size of a 5 gallon bucket?
It would never fit under the hood of my 99 Ford F250 which by most modern engine compartment standards is pretty roomy.
Also with the $5000 price tag even at a top end fuel savings of 25% on my pickups less than grand 12 MPG fuel milage at today's fuel prices I would have to drive over 100,000 miles just to break even on fuel costs to pay for the system.
Put that on a vehicle that gets 20 - 30 MPG and that over 200 - 300K miles to beak even.
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"Did you get my e-mail?" - "The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place" - George Bernard Shaw, 1856
It doesn't looks like installation is really that simple.
Bolt on? Well, sure, use bolts, but first where are you going to put it? Most modern passenger vehicles don't have room for that size device under the hood. I doubt most people will think hood deletion is an acceptable solution.
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About this regenerative claim. This thing is connected to the crankshaft. Any regenerative braking will have to be turning the engine and transmission as well. I doubt you will see much 'regenerative braking' benefit with an automatic transmission, and even with a manual transmission this is far from optimal...improvement in efficiency would be small at most and would require special driving techniques.
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I suspect the 'regeneration' is simply that if this motor isn't pushing, then it is charging the batteries and so represents a load on the engine. Utility electric can be cheap, but electric generated by your gas engine is more expensive than your gas engine.
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So this seems like a great solution for someone who wants to claim the modification is for efficiency, but actually wants some more power, and doesn,'the mind going hoodless, increasing weight by hundreds of pounds, and losing space for luggage/grocieries.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
If i am going to spend $5000 on something like that, i would spend it on a decent battery bank and high amp alternator. Charge those batteries up while i drive around town, or run some big equipment like a commercial brush chipper all day, then plug them in at home and draw them down grid tied, reducing my homes electric power bill. I think a setup like that would pay back quicker than an install designed to "double your mileage" if you go downhill both ways enough, etc...If a decent battery bank could be developed that doesnt have to be replaced before you see payback anyway.
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"god gave us fuel, greed gave us gas"
It may be silly to trust in the idea of going down hill both way, but that doesn't make the idea of benefiting from going up hill both ways any more sound.
Attempting to displace some of power from typically the cheapest source (utility electric is typically very inexpensive compared to ICE fuel) by siphoning off some extra power through real conversion processes from an ICE with expensive fuel is highly unlikely to provide economic benefits...to you at least.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
Looks like yet another waste of money product using current hyped technology to remove money from fools (borderline scam depending on how they are marketing it). The massive added weight alone would likely reduce the vehicles performance and MPG compared to any small real gains that it may actually offer.
Invest the 5k cost of this thing in properly-trained mechanics replacing and tuning the vehicles engine and possibly even transmission and drive train of the vehicle (if money still left over) for far greater power and efficiency benefits.
It's not a workable design, especially in Australia.
Like a standard reactor design it uses a steam engine to generate the power (motive in this case), on a moving vehicle where do you store all the water? You ain't going to extract it from the air to move heavy vehicle.
Apparently the Stanley Motor Company had the water storage thing worked out. Not sure how much water they carried but the Wikipedia page says they got 10-12 miles per gallon out of it.
It's not the same thing thou is it. For the proposed nuclear designs the water isn't just for creating steam, it is (I believe) for cooling and regulating the reactor temperature also which requires that the hot water is cooled somehow (eg-huge radiators) to prevent runaway nuclear reaction. In a fixed location huge amounts of replensable water are available, not so a moving vehicle.
Nuclear-powered plane designs (I think it was Boeing that had the most modern recent design concept) also had similar problems, but I think it was the weight of the shielding that made it impractical, I think they had enough surface area to make a closed-loop water cooling cycle work for a long endurance nuclear bomb armed design (again working from memory).
The Stanley steam vehicle designs also didn't have to worry about lugging around huge amounts of lead for shielding either, which seriously affects mpg performance (who would have thought it).
'.... hot water is cooled somehow (eg-huge radiators) to prevent runaway nuclear reaction....'
Cooling is required mostly for two broad reasons but not to prevent runaway nuclear reaction in most cases. One reason is because a thermal sink is required to operate any heat engine. The other main reason is to avoid material degradation/failure related to excessively high temperatures.
Most reactors and all well designed reasonably safe reactors are built with and maintain an unambiguously negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. This means that introduction of extremely cold coolant is a potential path to incident with excess reactivity (potential runaway nuclear reaction) and that a reduction in the ability to remove heat has the effect of reducing reactivity.
'....Nuclear-powered plane designs (I think it was Boeing that had the most modern recent design concept) also had similar problems, but I think it was the weight of the shielding that made it impractical, I think they had enough surface area to make a closed-loop water cooling cycle work for a long endurance nuclear bomb armed design....'
IIRC, the US aircraft nuclear propulsion focused on direct air cooling though indirect air cooling via liquid metal coolant was an alternative. Not sure how easy it is to find, but I'm pretty sure a failure of one of the HTRE builds sprayed fission products over a pretty wide are in Idaho....which would be exactly the downside risk of using direct air cooling.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
..."Officially unveiled at the 1959 Geneva Auto Show, this concept was meant to predict the cars of 2000. It was to be atomic powered, voice controlled and guided by radar. The Fulgur also use only two wheels and was balanced by another hot 50's technology - gyroscopes."...
All I can say is the “power” it provides had better be very gentle as it engages. The front pulley and nose of the crankshaft is not designed for power application unless a PTO option was ordered, and sometimes not even then. (snap!) Most drive pulleys on the nose of a crankshaft are slip fit/press fit over a single key machined into a much smaller diameter extension of the crankshaft than the crank body. This further weakens the nose of the shaft where as the tail of the crankshaft where he flywheel / torque convert is mounted is a much more robust piece of steel. I won’t even go into the effect of harmonics and vibration on bearing and oil seals.
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Yes good point, it is a one to one drive and constantly engaged, the electric motor is either driving or being driven by the crankshaft at all times....
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All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
Can anybody explain how we got from an electric hybrid add-on, belt driven, combination contraption to,"an 'unambiguously negative' temperature coefficient of reactivity."
Perhaps the Department of Redundancy Department will know?
For those of us less schooled in the art of nuclear reactions: Chernobyl and the Central Role of the Temperature Coefficient tells us that, "reactors must be built where the temperature coefficient of reactivity is negative. But how do we do this?
Actually, it’s much easier than you think. In a conventional light-water reactor, the water both cools the nuclear fuel and moderates (slows) the neutrons, increasing the probability of fission.
The temperature coefficient in these reactors is negative, because if the temperature increases, the water heats up and expands. If it expands, there’s less water in the core, which means there’s less hydrogen (bound in the water) to moderate the neutrons. The energy of the neutrons increases, and fission becomes less likely (as we can see from the earlier chart [not included here] that shows the probability of fission as a function of neutron energy).
Hence, the temperature coefficient controls the temperature of the reactor—too high and it brings it down, too low and it brings it up. It is a very nice operational feature—a built-in natural throttle."
And to further complexify : During the very early days of steam locomotives, water stops were necessary every 7–10 miles (11-16 km) and consumed much travel time.[1][nb 1] With the introduction of tenders (a special car containing water and fuel), trains could run 100–150 miles (160–240 km) without a refill
The nuclear driven car need not use water as an expander gas, it could be a freon refrigerant and run at a much lower temperature in a closed loop system....
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All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
Freon as a coolant is not a good idea. High energy neutron and gamma radiation will breakdown freon resulting in some free fluorine ions and some HF among other reactive species. Good luck keeping anything under pressure for long.
A supercritical CO2 Rankine cycle would be better.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
I didn't say as a coolant...It could be used as an expander medium with the heat transfer fluid being something appropriate....The reactor could be on all the time, producing heat that would be used to generate electricity for home or car or charging batteries....Think of the commute up north during winter, get up in the morning to a warm car that has melted all the snow and ice already....
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All living things seek to control their own destiny....this is the purpose of life
I did not intend any slight by mere mention of an 'unambiguously negative temperature coefficient of reactivity'. 'Unambiguous negative temperature coefficient of reactivity' is what I should have written, as to modify the phrase adjectively instead of just the following word adverbally.
Your status is not threatened. No reason to worry. Nothing is more 'unambiguously negative' than you.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
No. You may not know what 'Unambiguous' means, or perhaps it is 'redundant' that you misunderstand (We all know it couldn't be 'negative' that has you stumped).
Something can be unambiguously positive. Since 'negative' and 'positive' are opposites in some sense, then 'unambiguous' cannot mean the same thing as 'negative' without having the opposite meaning from its own meaning. II hope you aren't suggesting that.
'Redundant' means 'superfluous, unnecessary'. Since a temperature coefficient of reactivity could be tentatively negative, barely negative, momentarily negative, hopefully negative, occasionally negative, or unreliably negative, the descriptor 'unambiguously' is meaningful and important in the context. It isn't sufficient to just say 'negative'. If you don't understand why I'll be happy to explain.
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As a side note, you have things confused in your explanation of temperature coefficient of reactivity. Reactor temperature is not controlled by temperature coefficient of reactivity.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
I'm not arguing with the fool, just correcting some of the errors he is propagating.
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When you post someoneelse's work as an explanation, you should have some confidence in the validity or it should be abundantly clear you are not suggesting what you are quoting is actually true. When you copy and paste it implies that you have evaluated the statement and deem it worth republishing.
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When what you have written is pointed out in error, or otherwise criticized, claiming what you commented was not your (so that you are not responsible for correcting the falsehood, and offer not even an attempt at rebuttal) is not an honorable path. Those may not originally your words, but in copying and pasting, so responsibility people seeing those words now belongs to you.
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Look, Lyn, it is pretty clear you do understand how I was using the term 'unambiguously', despite your argument to the contrary. Temperature coefficient of reactivity is a variable not set in stone. It changes with changes in other parameters. If it were to be ambiguously negative/positive, that would be dangerous. Ambiguous in that case means you wouldn't be certain is it were positive or negative without knowing the exact state of the reactor, i.e, it could be negative or positive depending on where in the normal range other parameters are.
I believe in you Lyn. I know that you have the ability to grasp the concept of 'ambiguous' as it is used in this context (and how it is well aligned with standard usage you are familiar with), but it seems like your curmudgeonliness is occluding the logical path you could take.
I'lI just keep calling out the logic and you see if you can grab ahold of any of it. We will get you un-lost. Just don't give up.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
By the way, zero is a number which is not negative and not positive.
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Not that is matters, your argument is relevant since coefficient of reactivity is a variable subject to change, not a single number. As such, ambiguity as to negativity or positivity is indeed a possibility for conceivable realities.....
..which is why, as I said before, there is no reason to fear a loss of status. Nothing will ever be as unambiguously negative as you.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. - George Santayana
The E-Charger System...
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